These have probably been mentioned before, but its a suggestions board and I dunno if these have been implemented in any way:
Armor penetration adjustment:
# armorModifier: 0.5
with this any target hit will have their armor multiplied by the value indicated before its deducted from the damage (but not before the damage side of the equation has been resolved).
This makes it possible to have low damage / high penetration weapons like needlers, railguns, and beam weapons. They can punch through armor but against tough critters they're not going to be any more effective than their damage value indicates (30 damage rifle with 0.3 would be able to challenge power armor but unlike applying a damage multiplier, its not going to jack up that 0-60 points of damage). This way soldiers can be threatened by things that will make them bleed but not necessarily kill them straight away like high powered weapons will.
Likewise "focused plasma" weapons that do damage like gauss weapons but penetrate as well as the normal version.
Likewise this immediately addresses the needs for a Shotgun that does alot of damage but doesnt penetrate armor. Realistic shotguns pretty much fire in a straight line and would cause about as much damage as the autocannon, but rather than counting up a bunch of smaller hits its better to just sum it up as a single hit that is less effective against armor. And generally speaking whether you're talking about buckshot or a slug they both still do sum-total less damage than a .50 which sits at about 50-60 damage points by vanilla standards (I imagine its what the tank/cannon fires)
This probably shouldnt apply to scenery tile armor, since the "armor" the tile has is more like its health (or like the Break DC in d20 games) and thats much more of a Damage issue.
Shotgun Pellets cone/spread modulation:
# shotgunPelletsAccuracy: 85
# shotgunPelletsDisplayEffects: true
Determines the cone of trajectories for any multi-projectile attacks, sets it as a flat rate. In this case the same as if a shooter had an 85% accuracy listed for their attack next to the TU value.
The other part would take a multi-projectile attack and emulate firing multiple times (not simultaneously) similar to the way Auto attacks are done. So if it had shotgunpellets: 5 that means you're going to see 5 separate attacks one after another similar to an auto attack.
Though it could also be combined with a weapon that can do auto attacks, unless you keep the number of pellets low it could be a torture test on the part of the player (like seeing a train of 15 separate attacks that all resolve individually), but oh well thats something a modder would have to consider.
Explosion Falloff adjustment:
# blastRadiusType: 0, 1, 2
# 0 = normal and truncated directly at blast radius limit if present
# 1 = falloff to the blast radius limit
# 2 = blast radius actually tells the game the extent that Full Damage reaches out to,
# then falls off normally after that
Mode 0 would be like it already is, falloff is handled normally, if "blastradius" is defined then it doesnt hit anything beyond that distance to the explosion.
Mode 1 is a direct scaler to the amount of damage that gets absorbed by tiles as the blast reaches out. Since the theoretical maximum blast size is 1 tile per 10 points caused, setting the "blastradius" to larger or smaller will act indirectly as a multiplier to the amount of damage that gets lost for each tile.
For example a blaster launcher with blastradius: 11 will multiply the damage absorbed per tile by 20/11 so that by the time it reaches a radius of 11 tiles the damage will have been reduced to 0 by then.
But likewise a "frag grenade" that does 45 damage but has blastradius: 12 will multiply the damage absorbed per tile by 4/11 giving it a much larger area of effect than its damage value might otherwise suggest (currently the way blastradius works would make this impossible).
Mode 2 works a little bit like the explosions in Halo: CE. This causes a big immersive fireball effect, everybody near ground zero takes damage as if they were hit directly since it doesn't get reduced. After that damage falls off at the normal rate. "blastradius" sets the distance for full damage.
These adjustments are mainly to curtail or increase the amount of reach the explosion has so it could be worthwhile to exclude any tiles set as Walls because these can still (logically) block explosions by virtue of toughness rather than the fact they are just extra distance to cover.
Or with some extra (or less?) effort, assume that plain flat ground tiles always deduct 10 and just apply adjustments to That Number only rather than the actual blast resistance value. For example if a tile blocks 20 exp damage then the frag grenade would only subtract ~6.7 points from it and be reduced to 13 rather than actually multiplying the value and it only blocking 7 points. A Ufo Wall wouldn't be impacted meaningfully doing it this way (it would only lose 6.7 points from its blocking power as well, fully containing the explosion).
